Proprioception and reaction for walking among entanglements

Entanglements like vines and branches in natural settings or cords and pipes in human spaces prevent mobile robots from accessing many environments. Legged robots should be effective in these settings, and more so than wheeled or tracked platforms, but naive controllers quickly become entangled and stuck. In this paper we present a method for proprioception aimed specifically at the task of sensing entanglements of a robot's legs as well as a reaction strategy to disentangle legs during their swing phase as they advance to their next foothold. We demonstrate our proprioception and reaction strategy enables traversal of entanglements of many stiffnesses and geometries succeeding in 14 out of 16 trials in laboratory tests, as well as a natural outdoor environment.Comment: Submitted to 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System

CERAMICS HEART BOOKS exhibition documentation, 2017

Some of the earliest evidence of written text can be found on clay tablets from Sumer and Meso-America. The CCA Ceramics department continues this ceramic based fascination of text through writing, cataloging, interventions and interpretation of books, text, language and media. This fascination is most easily summed up in our newest form of visual language, the ideogram (aka the emoji)